Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin we've had those sweet sweet RTX graphics and desktops for a little while now however today is the day that it is finally time for all this power to come down to the laptop side of things to test we have the brand new rog Zephyrus s 17-inch they actually took a brief look at this laptop at CES however at that time Nvidia had the performance testing side of things locked down but with this in our hands it's time to see exactly what we can get out of our checks for laptops here we've got the top in our TX 2080 pair with a core i7 8750 H now the main cut back going from the full desktop GPU to the laptop max2 Edition is in TDP instead of having over 200 watts to work with this has to fit and they 100 watt budget which basically just means that the clock speed comes down desktop is about 1700 megahertz this is a little bit over 1200 as far as boost clocks go take a look at the benchmarks though and it is not a massive improvement but you will see a pretty good performance bump over the previous generation gtx 1080 and especially that max-q implementation now benchmarks are one thing what I want to know is what will it take to get this RTX 2080 running at a full 1080p at 144 frames per second which is what this screen can do now starting off with let's see what we can do with overwatch well three seconds into overwatch it looks like this is no problem we're completely maxed out on ultra settings at 1080p and right now we're about a hundred and sixty frames per second I gotta say overwatch looks like a solid thumbs up on this front next up we have everyone's favorite game fortnight so this I think should be pretty easy for the 2080 to handle even on full epic settings I don't think it'll be an issue for tonight is another game that is no problem to run although we're a little bit closer here at what a hundred and I are oh no we're 2120 so especially a pair with that g-sync panel 144 frames per second is no problem in fortnight so now let's move on to black ops so it comes to black ops I'm not super sure that we're actually going to be able to max it out fully and still had 144 frames but uh it's gonna try I guess I will mention that I am running this on the balanced power mode so you can crank the fan up to turbo but in my testing it only gives you another couple percentage or so of performance but it's like twice as loud so I'm not gonna do that okay yeah I immediately I can tell that we're at a hundred frames per second which is good and to be fair we do have a g-sync panel which means that's nice and smooth but a ninety hundred frames per second that's not what we're looking for it's all I needed to do is crank things down to high and we're pretty much locked at 140 fps next let's see how battlefield 5 fares we are in the game this is not 144 frames this is about 50 frames so the thing with battlefield that's going to be difficult is it does support rate racing there's one of the very few games that does support rate racing right now but it is incredibly demanding especially on the ultra setting ok so turning rate racing down to low gave us a big boost in frames we're now up to about 90 which on this g-sync panel honestly really is not a problem I would be totally happy to play the game like this damn look look at that look at the reflection every time I see a car I have to go and like oh I should probably do that so this is a playable game absolutely but I want 144 frames per second which means it's time to start cranking that thing down now that's more like it we're about a hundred and thirty one hundred and forty frames per second right now I did have to turn off ray tracing and set everything down to medium but I mean we do have a very very playable 140 frames per second I mean to be fair medium looks totally fine and that 144 frames per second is a big deal but if it's me I'm going to turn the ray tracing on and give up a few frames per second to get that extra a little bit of visual know gaming is great but this also is great for content creation so Wes how does it handle resolve and specifically red stuff so what we have playing here is seven and a K red footage playing down at quarter res but as you can see with a color grade on there and a few nodes doing kind of a punch here grade it is playing back at real time which is something that resolve would struggle with on lower inspect this makes a lot of sense as a laptop to use for content creation then right because you've got something that's fairly thin you do have the Pantone color calibrated display which realistically well so-so look coming out of the factory it'll be pretty good it's going to shift over the first few hours honestly abuse but by having a good display that means that if you are someone that wants to calibrate in the future you can be fairly comfortable that you are going to be able to get a fairly good Cal raishin out of it next let's talk about this actual laptop itself these Zephyrus s which there's actually a lot more to talk about them purely just the graphic side this shares a lot of DNA with the original Zephyrus well it's closed it's only 18 mm thick when you open it up the entire deck lid raises to give more cooling from the bottom there's also a very unusual placement for the keyboard and trackpad so it's all put on the bottom half of the laptop which means that this top half is entirely dedicated to cooling that CPU and especially the GPU now this doesn't take a little bit of getting used to but it's really not so bad now the same thing goes with a touchpad well it's a little bit smaller than usual most importantly it has a solid surface and you do have the option of turning it into a number pad and some of the best sounding click buttons I've ever tried on a trackpad all this means that this is among these smallest 17-inch gaming laptops that you can buy that being said though it is still a 17-inch gaming laptop sure it's a little bit closer to something like that 15 inches efforts that came out last year but realistically there's no getting around that this is a very very big footprint for a laptop I'll give them this though it only six pounds it is way lighter than you would expect considering that there is that full 20/80 inside but don't exactly expect to you know fit this in your backpack easily the display itself is exactly what you would expect out of a high-end gaming laptop it's a 17.3 inch panel with a 1080p resolution but importantly 9 does it run at a full 144 Hertz but it also supports g-sync you also have Nvidia Optimus onboard usually you have to pick one or the other g-sync is for keeping those frame rates nice and smooth to keep any kind of tearing out whereas optimus allows you to turn off that graphics card when you're not using it to save battery life now in this you do have to manually turn it on as well as restart the laptop when you're switching between the two most of the time when you have a laptop with g-sync it means that you're gonna get like an hour of battery life so thankfully that's not the case here with Optimus onboard paired with the decently sized 76 watt hour battery I've been able to get about three to three-and-a-half hours of normal use with the laptop and that's not gaming mind you but this is actually a laptop that you can do some other stuff with not a lot of other stuff but some other stuff you do have the added benefit of supporting USB C charging now that's not enough to fully power the laptop it tops out at 65 watts so it's a lot more first kind of charging to overnight or using it for lighter tasks but importantly this means that if you want to take this on the go you don't have to always carry the giant 200 watt power brake instead you can take a smaller one just plug into a USB C monitor to top off all so what we're talking about USB C it does have a pair of USB seaports but neither support Thunderbolt 3 something that the previous zephyrus did not exactly like a deal-breaker it's just kind of an odd decision something interesting about this notebook is the webcam it doesn't have one that is where this comes in in the box they do include an external webcam there's a couple reasons for this first of all they don't have a whole lot of bezel to work with on the top but more importantly this is a higher quality webcam than usual 9 does it'll support 1080p but it also has a full 60fps output and on top of that they also have a little stand that comes with it so if you want to do something like twitch streaming you can set the webcam off to the side you know what this actually does look a lot better than most webcams employee on a laptop not sure if not going to be quite as good as something like a dedicated camera set up for twitch streaming you're saying that this comes in the box I've got to say really not a bad idea all right not bad so the audio is pretty impressive here now I do have a pair of speakers that are firing directly at you but on top of that there is this awesome little wheel to control the volume it's like what you would find on a lot of mechanical keyboards and I love it look seriously can everyone just adopt this like I want this on every laptop ever no way you might imagine all of this doesn't exactly come cheap the Zephyrs s starts at $2,700 and the model I have here comes in at a full 30,000 $200.00 I don't know why I had to say 0 cents it just sounds more impressive that way with that artsy x28 Emacs Q inside you will not find another gaming laptop that's this thin as well as this light while still giving you a full 17 inch display and importantly this much performance now whether it's worth the price tag is kind of up to you but I've got to say they did a lot right with the Zephyrus s